The autumn of 2018 marked the 60th anniversary of the Buchenwald Memorial, erected on the southern slopes of the Ettersberg near Weimar in 1958. Today the monument is no longer integrated into the official memorial programme at Buchenwald, as the ideas it expresses are considered too one-sided to be compatible with a contemporary politics of memory. But might it be possible to (re)activate the site for present-day forms of remembering and memorializing, and can the monument be preserved and used as more than just an historical witness to the former East German regime's approach to interpreting the past?
The article traces the development of two interventionist projects that were carried out in the jubilee year: an interactive performance on the memorial site, and a set of impromptu student designs for its hypothetical transformation. Central to both projects was the question of whether "preservation" can also take the form of artistic processes of performative appropriation, rehabilitation and reinterpretation, and what contribution an historic preservation perspective can make to this process.